Things I Want to Learn Post TIY

OMG SO MUCH TO LEARN

I think my header pretty accurately states how I feel about the world of technology and programming. There is so much to learn. Like way more than any person could ever hope to learn in a human lifetime. Not only that, but I really love learning all this stuff! There is a massive list of stuff that we’ve touched on in The Iron Yard that I want to dig deeper into just for personal curiosity, but also because I’m well aware that the more I know, the more valuable I will be to whatever entity I wind up working for. I also want very much to expand my knowledge of true computer science so I can more fully understand all the things I’m doing on a deeper level. I’ve found some really great resources online that have compiled a list of great Coursera and Edx courses in the computer science field that really seem like great ways to expand my knowledge base.

I’ve decided to create a list of topics that I want to explore and post it here so I can refer to it and add to it, but also so I can easily see the progress I’m making towards my goals. This list isn’t in any hard and fast order, but the stuff at the top is probably a little more immediately appealing to me.

Work through suggested online curriculums posted here and here. There is significant overlap between the two curriculums and I feel like they both address a computer science track very effectively. I expect this to take several years, assuming I’m taking these courses part time while working full time and working on other projects.

Learn R and brush up on my statistics knowledge base. I took a few stat courses in college so I definitely feel like I was ahead of a lot of my class in that regard, but I’d really like to become a statistics master and learn how to integrate R into that, seeing as how my interests right now lean heavily towards data. This goes hand in hand with the curriculums posted above.

Contribute to open source projects. I feel like I still have more to learn before this is completely feasible, but I don’t think it’s that far off in the future.

Explore more machine learning! I’m fascinated by the concept and want to pick up some good books on the topic and explore it with some personal projects.

Get an ideal workflow to be as efficient as possible, exploring Vim, more command line tools and getting more comfortable with it.

Learn more languages. I mentioned learning R and that’s just the beginning. Eventually I’d like to learn Ruby for sure, as I really love the Ruby community that I’ve been exposed to. I’d also like to explore Haskell, as I’ve seen that very commonly recommended for Python programmers as a first functional language. I’ve heard a lot about the value of learning at least some C in order to understand more modern languages, so that’s on my list as well. Also I see a lot of utility in learning C sharp or C++. Although given an infinite amount of time, I’d want to learn every single language possible.

Rebuild this blog with Django. I’d like to play with Django more as well as HTML and CSS and even some Javascript. It seems like the perfect opportunity! The only downside is I wouldn’t be able to use Github-pages to host my site any longer, but that seems like a small price to pay for a truly dynamic blog/personal site.